An attorney for Josh Duggar is seeking to reverse his conviction for downloading child pornography.
Attorneys for both Duggar and the U.S. Justice Department appeared before a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a hearing, where Duggar’s attorneys say investigators violated his rights by seizing the phone he was using to try to call his lawyer during the search that found the images.
The former reality star was convicted in 2021 and sentenced last year to 12 1/2 years in prison.
Duggar was arrested in April 2021 after a Little Rock, Arkansas, police detective found child porn files were being shared by a computer traced to him. Investigators testified that images depicting the sexual abuse of children were downloaded in 2019 onto a computer at a dealership he owned.
Prosecutors say the computer Duggar used had a monitoring program on it to report his activities to his wife, Anna Duggar, but the images and video were downloaded after separate software was installed that would allow him to download items without being detected.
Additionally, they say that Duggar was free to leave the scene and not speak with agents without an attorney, and he was with two other people whose cellphones weren’t seized, indicating "he had an option to speak to a lawyer even though obviously the officers had appropriately seized the phone at the outset of their search."
Duggar’s attorneys argued, "What federal agents did is they physically took the phone out of his hand and from that point forward, deprived him of the ability to communicate with his legal counsel, as was his constitutional right."
Allegations against the 34-year-old go back as far as 2006, when authorities received a tip from a family friend accusing him of molesting four of his sisters and a babysitter years earlier. However, it was concluded that the statute of limitations had passed on any possible charges.
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The news resurfaced in 2015 while the Duggar family’s reality show, "19 Kids and Counting," was airing on TLC, and the series was canceled.
Duggar later apologized for cheating on his wife and having a pornography addiction and sought treatment.
Last month, Fox News Digital spoke with Duggar’s sister, Jinger Duggar Vuolo, who wrote a book about leaving the family’s religion titled "Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear."
"That’s something that is still just so difficult for me to talk about," Duggar Vuolo admitted. "And my heart breaks for the victims and their families. And at the same time, I’m just so grateful for the justice system. I’m grateful that justice is being served. It’s just so heartbreaking."
Fox News Digital’s Stephanie Nolasco and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
